Like a clean cow chewing cud...so Bede describes the poet Caedmon. This blog is a place to report news, calls for papers, news items, and other things of interest to the Late Antique, Patristic, Early Medieval, and Book Arts folk and to just chat about things medieval.
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

In the comments Derek the Anglican raises a good point worth exploring. Especially when cataloging sermons, we tend to treat similar sermons, or sermons that have adapted another sermon as "the same text." And with Derek I have to say that I do not think that this is a valid procedure. At the very least we should be marking these with some way of differentiating the different versions. We need to recognize that even an adapted sermon or homily is remediated and recontextualized: that ol' problem of continuity with what it borrowed but discontinuity at the same time and the acceptance of a new audience. Sometimes that will be more important than at others.

Professor Richard Hogg: Historian of the English languagePublished: 10 December 2007

Richard Milne Hogg, historian of the English language: born Edinburgh 20 May1944; Lecturer in English Language, University of Amsterdam 1969-73;Lecturer in English Language, Lancaster University 1973-80; Smith Professorof English Language and Medieval Literature, Manchester University1980-2007; General Editor, Cambridge History of the English Language1992-2001; FBA 1994; married 1969 Margaret White (two sons); died Manchester6 September 2007.

Richard Hogg, a world-renowned specialist in the linguistic history ofEnglish, died suddenly midway through the sabbatical year which should haveallowed him to bring important projects on dialectology and on Old Englishto completion. His best-known achievement is the six-volume CambridgeHistory of the English Language (CHEL, 1992-2001), of which he was GeneralEditor.

Hogg's roots were in Edinburgh, where he was born, in 1944, grew up andstudied. After nearly 40 years away, he was still wholly a Scot in speechand sympathies. His postgraduate career in Edinburgh had begun with twocontrasting academic preoccupations: the Chomskyan analysis of present-dayEnglish syntax on the one hand (his PhD topic), and Middle English dialectson the other (his research post). In their very different ways, bothrepresented state-of-the-art linguistics of the time.

At 26 he took up a lectureship in Amsterdam, and four years later he movedto Lancaster University. In 1980 he arrived at Manchester University as thesurprisingly young Smith Professor of English Language and MedievalLiterature. Not that I recall him ever teaching literature: it was rarelypossible to get him to do anything that he didn't want to.

His early publications are mostly on the syntax of words like "both" and"none", including the book (English Quantifier Systems, 1977) derived fromhis PhD. Increasingly he started to focus on the sounds and forms ofhistorical English, especially Old English, the period up to about 1100, onwhich he became an authority. He tackled linguistic change generally, and aninterest in analogy led to one paper called simply "Snuck" ­ an explanationfor that common variant of "sneaked". He also worked in phonological theory,publishing the influential textbook Metrical Phonology (1987) with hiscolleague and former student, Chris McCully.

The historical strand led to the multi-author Cambridge History of theEnglish Language (CHEL), a big project which took many years of planning andgood management to bring to successful completion. It has become a standardwork in the field. Hogg himself edited the first volume on the earliestperiod of English and wrote the chapter on phonology and morphology. Lastyear, we jointly edited a new one-volume History of the English Language,and Hogg was still working on his own Grammar of Old English (volume 1published in 1992, volume 2 nearly complete at his death).

He ranged widely. Interests included English dialectology ­ both the factsof variation in historical and present-day English and the ways in whichscholars have approached these facts. Likewise he followed the history ofEnglish grammar writing and attitudes to language. His main current project,three-quarters finished, was a history of English dialectology that combinedthose themes of language variation and of intellectual and cultural history.He was planning a joint monograph with his newest colleague, NuriaYáñez-Bouza, on the history of prescriptivism in England.

In the mid-1990s Hogg became one of the founding editors (together with BasAarts and me) of a new academic journal published by Cambridge UniversityPress, English Language and Linguistics. It would look for the best inEnglish language scholarship, but with a constant eye to its relation withlinguistic theory. In addition to his scholarly expertise, Richard Hoggbrought to the project a shrewd understanding of the academic world and ofacademic publishing. Throughout his career he strongly promoted theimportance of English Language studies. Philologists pay close attention totextual evidence; linguists build theories. Hogg did both.

Although he wore it lightly, Hogg was always a thinker, and time and againhis judgement was proved sound. He came up with imaginative, ofteningenious, suggestions both as a theorist and as an organiser. In meetingshe could talk his way through the twists and turns of a complicated sequenceof ideas with a body language to match. He had acted as Dean of the Facultyof Arts in Manchester (1990-93), and was influential nationally andinternationally, often called on as adviser or consultant. In 1994 he waselected a Fellow of the British Academy, and a decade later of the RoyalSociety of Edinburgh.

Hogg was fun to have around, always ready for conversation and gossip. Hisenthusiasm for the English language was infectious, and in breaks he couldchat with students about football, film or country music. Indeed, thelectures themselves were often studded with anecdotes. He started a blog in2006 in an "attempt to expose some of the many fallacies about English".Church takes first step to redundancy

Monday, December 10, 2007

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

I'm knee deep in editing my manuscripts again. At least until its time to correct them thar papers and finals next week. But anyway, its brought up a question that started pontificating on back in April. Then I segued into modern applications, but now I want to tackle the problem from a different point of view.

I'll use my own work as an example. The Letter to Sigeweard survives in a single manuscript in its entirety. BUT, 3 other manuscripts have texts that seem to be part of the letter. BUT, those "parts" are not letters: that is, while the text overlaps with the text of the letter, and may a) have been adapted from the letter for other purposes or b) may have been material that Aelfric was preparing for sermons and used to fill out the letter written roughly simultaneously with his work on those sermons. In fact, I'm arguing both depending on which of the other manuscripts is being spoken of.

The issue I want to think about and raise here is about those other "parts." It seems that in each case the overlapping material with the letter is material being used as a sermon. In one case, it is highly improbable that Aelfric made this text into a sermon and so a later redactor adapted this letter for sermonic purposes, as he did also for a couple of other Aelfrician epistles. In the other cases it isn't so clear.

Now the traditional treatment of all these parts is to consider them as part of the "Letter to Sigeweard", though none of the other copies have ever been used to create a critical text of those overlapping portions. The closest we come is the Crawford edition of the letter in EETS The Heptateuch, which edits the main mss and one other that contains a large portion of the text, but does so in parallel columns rather than as a critical text.

So my questions are these: 1) isn't creating a critical edition of the Letter in a sense doing violence to the manuscript context of the adapted portions? 2) how best to produce both a "critical" edition and yet at the same time preserve the texts that appear as separate units in other manuscripts--that they be enjoyed, read, and studied not simply as parts of the Letter to Sigeweard but as independent texts, they are both and should be studied as both.